CHAPTER 5
The shortest book on Richard Wagner, Aspects of Wagner (1968) by the late British philosopher Bryan Magee, which is both brilliant and succinct, has a chapter called “Jews—Not Least in Music.” In it the author discusses Wagner’s recognition that Jews would somehow dominate classical music. Magee offers a unique explanation for the extraordinary explosion of Jewish achievements in art, literature, science, philosophy, and music starting in the nineteenth century. He writes that it is not a question of Jews being superior as a race (which would turn anti-Semitism on its head and fall into the trap of inverted racism). Nor is the explanation that Jews have a unique intellectual tradition that suddenly flowered after centuries into the aforementioned fields. Instead, Magee writes:
Originality in fundamentals is inimical to any closed, authoritarian culture, because such cultures do not and cannot allow their basic assumptions to be questioned. As Napoleon conquered Europe, he opened the ghettos of Europe, and when the ghettos were finally opened, the Jews had a . . . renaissance of their own, with all the same broad features (as in ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and Protestant Europe): the lapse of two or three generations between emancipation and the peak achievement; the dissociation of the greatest creative geniuses from the closed religious and intellectual achievement; the lifelong struggle against institutional prejudice and personal resentment—and before the end, murder on an enormous scale, highly organized and state supported.
Seemingly before anyone else, Wagner saw it coming. He railed against his contemporary composers who controlled the Opéra in Paris—Fromental Halévy and Giacomo Meyerbeer, both Jews—and commended Felix Mendelssohn (born into a prominent Jewish family but raised without religion until being baptized at the age of seven) for his immense talent, while criticizing his total lack of profundity. At the time of Wagner’s death in 1883, two great composers who were Jewish—Gustav Mahler and the other, still a boy, Arnold Schoenberg—would lead a wave of Jewish talent that would permeate the first half of twentieth-century classical music. Great German composers, instrumentalists, conductors, and singers who happened to be Jewish would confront how the German people—and the world—would define what made music “German.” In 1933 there were a mere 400,000 German citizens who identified themselves as Jews. They were living in a country of 67 million.
What happens when a highly cultured country officially declares itself to be anti-Semitic—and Jews constitute much of its creative class? The answer is obvious: cultural suicide. Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, Germany and Austria (once it was annexed to the Third Reich) have simply never recovered.
Much has been written about what the Nazis called “degenerate art” and “degenerate music.” The German word entartet was invented in the nineteenth century, and it is a repulsive word: ent- means “away from” and art means “type” or “kind.” In its original form, Entartung was a term used by Max Nordau in an 1892 book of the same name, which attacked the excesses of Wagner and others (as well as anti-Semitism!) as examples of the degeneration of fin de siècle society. The Nazis appropriated the term for their own ends.
This strange word can be used to refer to anything at all that is outside borders or expectations. It evokes a repulsion because it implies that the object is a deformed thing, something with flaws. At the same time, it is vague enough to go beyond words such as “retarded,” “malformed,” and “sick.”
Because art and music were considered so important in unifying the German Reich, the Nazis mounted two exhibitions to show Germans how disgusting and dangerous certain art and music can be. The first exhibition, in 1937, was for visual art (Entartete Kunst) that had been confiscated from museums and private owners and was first seen in Munich before being taken to various cities in Germany and then Austria. Hitler had decided, against Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s desire to show the Reich as forward-looking and modern, that no modern art was to be seen in Germany. The Nazis were thorough in their bookkeeping and we know that 16,558 works were stolen from German citizens and institutions and over two million Germans attended the touring exhibition. Those artworks selected to be on display were then grouped in terms of various forms of degeneracy—“Insolent Mockery of the Divine,” “An Insult to German Womanhood,” “The Ideal: Cretin and Whore,” “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul,” and so forth.
In 1938, the Reich decided to mount another exhibition. This one, curated by Weimar’s theater intendant, Hans Severus Ziegler, and first seen in Düsseldorf, was dedicated to music (Entartete Musik). Although it was on a smaller scale, it officially set out the Nazis’ view on what it saw as dangerous—and officially forbidden—music. The difficulty was that the outlawed music had no consistent style, whereas the artworks displayed in the Degenerate Art exhibition were non-realistic and selected to show distorted visual images and “depraved” subject matter. Any music by a Jew or a Communist was outlawed. However, Jews and Communists, like the rest of Germany’s composers, were writing in many musical styles, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or political persuasion. The Lutheran Paul Hindemith and the Roman Catholic Ernst Krenek had also disturbed the leaders of the Third Reich and would also become artistic enemies of the state.
It was, therefore, incumbent upon the government to explain its rather confusing position to the German people. Musicologists who wished to maintain their positions at universities—which no longer allowed Jews to be professors, or indeed to teach—wrote thoroughly researched and argued academic articles that justified the damning of the music of Hindemith, Korngold, Weill, and Schoenberg, and supported the exclusion of Mendelssohn and Mahler, too. Trying to find common denominators in Hitler’s aesthetic pronouncements when it came to music is not simple, because there weren’t any.
Although he had fallen in love with Wagner’s operas as a teenager, Hitler apparently showed less interest in classical music than most of us think. He liked Verdi’s Aida and operettas—Franz Lehár’s 1905 Die Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) being a personal favorite. Lehár lived until 1948 and supplied a grand overture to his Widow that was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1940, two years after Austria was annexed into the Third Reich. And while Hitler knew he should express a passionate interest in encouraging Germans to support their classical institutions (indeed, members of the Berlin Philharmonic were excused from military service, and he saw to it that Wagner’s theater in Bayreuth was protected), he much preferred watching—and rewatching—his favorite Hollywood movies.
INVENTING THE ENEMY WITHIN
Hitler needed to bolster a sense of Germanness, and one of the ways to do it was to celebrate the universally accepted supremacy of German classical music. As already noted, the public for classical music was shrinking. Germans (and other Europeans) turned toward having more fun and excitement. In the cabarets and jazz clubs of their big cities, as well as on the radio, they heard music that was inspired by or emanated directly from the United States due to America’s presence in the last years of World War I and afterward. However, even though Germans might not attend a concert of Beethoven, the German people were still fiercely proud of their “brand,” as market research demonstrated.
In order to read the wishes of the Germans, the Nazis studied American polling techniques, which were understood to be the most advanced in the world. One person who helped her countrymen was the twenty-year-old Elisabeth Noelle, who was sent to the University of Missouri as a German exchange student from Berlin in 1937—much to the suspicion of fellow college students. She became a member of the Alpha chapter of the Gamma Alpha Chi sorority (founded at the university in 1920 and no longer in existence), which called itself “a national honorary advertising fraternity for women.”
Returning to her native country, Noelle in 1940 wrote a thesis titled “Amerikanische Massenbefragungen über Politik und Presse” (American Mass Surveys on Politics and the Press) on public opinion polls, especially those by George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, which had been formed in 1935. She was subsequently accused of politicizing ambiguous data, publishing it, and then taking a poll to show how the fake data influenced the public’s opinion. Her writings came to the attention of Goebbels, who put her to work for him. Thus, public policy and knowledge of how to read and control public opinion—learned from the United States—entered aesthetic decision-making in the Third Reich.1
It is well known that Germany had been insulted by the Treaty of Versailles that set the conditions for peace after World War I. The war had, after all, ended in an armistice, not in surrender. And yet Germany had been treated as the sole guilty party and severely punished. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 29, 1919, the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, formally ending the war. Arguably, it was also the first day of World War II insofar as it set in motion the environment of unpayable debt, public humiliation and rage that enabled Hitler to be seen as a champion of the German people and its culture. The German delegation was not even allowed to use the same exit as the other delegations at the signing ceremony at the Palace of Versailles. It took ninety-two years for Germany to pay off its war debts, with its last payment made on October 3, 2010, sixty-five years after World War II had ended and on the twentieth anniversary of German reunification.
If the German public valued its unassailable position as the country of classical music and was being humiliated from outside—while also needing a scapegoat from within—music had to play a crucial role in solidifying power for the Nazis.
Jazz was popular, but it was also linked with immorality and had a definitely “outsider” sound. It could therefore represent the German sense that its musical heritage (metaphorically representing the country of Germany) was under attack, and by racially inferior and dangerous foreigners from outside Germany. It was a drug and needed to be addressed by the government as an illegal substance.
The other poison came from within. The music of German Jews was deemed truly dangerous because some of it cleverly imitated beautiful and uplifting music as a way of infiltrating “True German Music” and taking over the country. It was not authentic. The “Wandering Jews” were a people without a true home. They survived through assimilation, and by stealing and profiting from the profound works of others—and they did it for money. “Degenerate music” could be experimental and modern, and it could be seductively old-fashioned and beautiful. It was to be destroyed because of the race of the artist who was committing either cultural adultery or cultural larceny.
This meant that the public had to be told what music was poisonous and what was not. Surely no one could tell that Korngold’s magnificent achievements were evil and empty by listening to his glorious 1927 opera Das Wunder der Heliane, which owes a great debt to Strauss’s 1917 opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow). The Student Prince, the tuneful Viennese-sounding operetta by the Jewish Sigmund Romberg (whose real name was Siegmund Rosenberg), was a hit in Berlin (as Der Studentenprinz) and was shut down in 1933.2
It would be more difficult, indeed impossible, to attack similar-sounding music of Johann Strauss and his son, Johann, Jr., especially after 1938, when Germany brought Austria into the Reich. The younger Strauss, who died in 1899, was known as the Waltz King. How could The Blue Danube Waltz and Die Fledermaus be banned? Instead, the Nazis simply erased the numerous Jewish aspects of the family’s lineage (even taking a pair of scissors to the baptism registry entries) and never mentioned the fact that Strauss, Jr. married three times, twice to Jewish women. His stepdaughter, always under threat of deportation, married a high-ranking Nazi official, but was nonetheless made to renounce the Strauss inheritance and royalties.
Lehár emotionally admitted after the war that he was given a choice as to whether to save his Jewish wife or the librettist of many of his operettas, Fritz Löhner-Beda (born Bedřich Löwy). He chose his wife, and Löhner-Beda was killed at Auschwitz.
Much contemporary music and music theater was easy to put on the list, because it was unpopular and much of it was meant to shock and be provocative. Schoenberg was clearly of Jewish origin. His recent music was not liked by the public, given its reliance on dissonance and unpleasant texts. He and his followers (who were not Jewish) could be outlawed without an outcry from the masses. Other non-Jews, such as Hindemith, had also set edgy stories for the stage. In one opera, Sancta Susanna (1921), a nun, having observed two young people making love from her window, tears off the veil on an enormous crucifix in the chapel of the nunnery. Once discovered naked and in a state of transcendent sexual frenzy, she demands to be buried alive within its walls. In his 1929 comic opera Neues vom Tage (News of the Day) Hindemith put a naked soprano in a bathtub, singing of the joys of the municipal water system. Goebbels was not only not amused, he was outraged, and any thought of remaining in Germany became impossible for the composer, even though he had already distanced himself from his earlier works. (One of the multiple ironies of this story is that composers such as Hindemith and Schoenberg, who were being attacked before World War II for being radical, were subsequently attacked after the war for being conservative and therefore irrelevant.)
Music that was entartet represented a grab bag of styles and used pseudo-science, aesthetic theories, moral outrage, and outright lies to push the Nazis’ political agenda. It is important to understand that the outlawed music had one other commonality—its compositional roots and the rigorous German training of its composers. Each composer whose music was deemed to be entartet had found fame and success, however, with very different “voices,” and had been lauded with much publicity and international fame.
Richard Strauss, universally seen as Germany’s greatest living composer, remained in place during the war. He was born in 1864 and died in 1949.3 At first he accepted the position as president of the Reich’s Music Bureau, which had been set up soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933 by Goebbels to promote “good German music” and act as a guild for composers. Strauss accepted this honorary position because he hoped he could do some good “and prevent worse misfortunes, if from now onwards, German musical life were going to be . . . ‘reorganized’ by amateurs and ignorant place-seekers.” He used his fame and official position to fight for the rights of classical composers to receive larger royalties for their music and extend copyright protections.
Since popular music from America, as well as music for beer halls, cabarets, and German operettas, was preferred by the German masses, Strauss felt that classical composers needed a higher royalty rate to ensure the survival of “serious” German music—something he achieved through legislation. This meant that all music had to be registered for copyright as either U-Musik (Unterhaltungsmusik, or “entertainment music,” that is, popular music) or E-Musik (Ernste Musik, or “serious music”). Thus, the split (and the royalty disparity) between serious and popular became a matter of law, imitated throughout the world, and initiated by classical music composers under the leadership of Strauss—and so it remains today.
Strauss was otherwise uninterested in politics. Useful to the Nazis for symbolic reasons, he was soon replaced. That his son Franz had married a Jew, and Strauss’s grandchildren were defined as Jews, meant the elderly composer had to avoid risk and stay out of trouble, writing his pure and transparently pastel operas. He had taken a big risk in setting the Jewish Stefan Zweig’s libretto for Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) in 1935.
Only one classical work emerged from the Nazi period (1933–45) that succeeded globally: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. An immediate success when it was first heard in 1937, it was embraced by the Nazis as proving to the world that new and great German works were being composed by pure Germans. (Orff is thought to have had some Jewish ancestry, but provided he was less than one-quarter Jewish, it would have been ignored by the Nazis.) In its own way, Carmina Burana is to World War II what Stravinsky’s Sacre is to World War I.
Inexorable and unstoppable in its tribal brutality, Carmina Burana had the advantage of being easier than Sacre to perform and understand. Its immediately recognizable and monumental blocks of simple harmonies and repetitive rhythms, and its periods of exotic sensuality, made it more of a musical aphrodisiac of power, rather than the unpredictable and undomesticated animal that is Sacre. To this day it remains the only work composed in the Third Reich by a German composer that has entered the repertory. The other great “German” works would be written in other countries—primarily in the United States, but also in France and England—where the great classical music traditions of over two centuries were successfully transplanted and flourished.